eTrex 20--first thoughts for benchmark hunting

[Wintertime]

The postman brought my new toy about an hour ago. It's great! Very easy to use. E.g. I noticed that the button on the front stuck out a ways, so I thought, "Hmmm, maybe in addition to pushing down on it for 'OK,' you can also push it side to side like a joystick." I was right. It replaces the big up/down/left/right control on my Garmin GPS III+.

 

By the time I bothered to connect it to my iMac and drag the user manuals off it, I had inserted batteries, gone outside, gotten a lock on both GPS and Glonass satellites (which gave me a supposed location accuracy of 9 feet even with WAAS turned off), made a waypoint, and checked when the next high tide is at the Alviso Slough. :-) The latter was just from noticing an odd symbol on the map and clicking on it to see what it was. I don't know how this thing gets tidal data, but there it is.

 

Then I came back inside and used the included USB cable to connect it to my computer. After copying the manuals, I downloaded the .gpx file for one of my own caches and dragged it into the GPX folder. Sure enough, after I disconnected the eTrex from the computer and turned it on again in GPS (rather than mass storage) mode, and went to the Geocaches section, there was my file--the whole thing, more than 2,500 words, with logs back to 2004.

 

Then I created a small .gpx file of survey marks and transferred that. (These were extracts from NGS datasheets, not benchmark reports from the Geocaching.com website.) That file also came up just fine. The eTrex does try to display geocache elements such as cache size, but that's a minor annoyance; I can quickly scroll past that to get to the actual datasheet. It displays the survey mark's designation as the "geocache" name; I'll have to see whether I can tweak the .gpx file to use the PID instead. I haven't investigated the POI capability yet to see whether that might work better than treating benchmarks as geocaches, but the latter is almost perfect anyway.

 

Oh, and it has a picture viewer! That means I can install photos that other people have taken of benchmark locations and use those to help me find them. (If only I'd had that the time I spent 20 minutes trying to interpret the station description for a mark in Yosemite! I realized later that there was a photo on the Geocaching.com website that would have allowed me to go right to the correct rock outcrop.)

 

I haven't done this yet, but from the description of the Profiles feature, I can have a Geocaching mode (one of the built-in modes) that uses DD MM.MMM, and a Benchmark mode (which I would create myself) that uses DDMMSS.

 

So first impression is that I'm glad I waited to buy a new GPSr (I'd been thinking about it last year), because this one has a bunch of new features that I'm really going to like.

 

Patty

[AZcachemeister]

Sounds like Garmin has got a lot of things right with that unit!

I heard about the GLONASS capabilities a couple of weeks ago...

Perestroika!

[AZcachemeister]

P.S. Forum thread bleed-over!

The DVD set is from .dat files I downloaded off Jim's site (Holograph) last March...or so. They certainly include all marks available on Geocaching.com.

All the original .dat files are included, with the .gpx file created by NGS>GPX.

[+EdrickV]

As far as editing .gpx files, well they're basically text files with xml code, so you can hand edit them pretty easily. Incidently, the NGS-GPX created files use Geocaching elements to display useful info. (Though I don't know if they'll all show up on that GPS right.) Like storing Adjusted/Scaled as cache size and PID instead of GC code.

 

If your iMac is an Intel CPU version, then you could try and see if NGS-GPX will work in WINE. (Even if you buy that DVD of GPX files, being able to use NGS-GPX yourself would allow you to add newer marks, or newer added marks, later on.) GSAK may also run under WINE and is a rather convenient program for managing Geocaches/Benchmarks.

[Wintertime]

It displays the survey mark's designation as the "geocache" name; I'll have to see whether I can tweak the .gpx file to use the PID instead.

I just remembered something--even my ancient Garmin GPS III+ could switch between displaying a geocache's name and its GC code, and that changed how benchmark .gpx files were displayed, too. Surely a newer model must still have that feature, right? So I just brought up the Geocaches file on the eTrex and looked at the options, and sure enough, there it was. Switched it from name to code, and now my benchmarks are listed by PID. No tweaks to the .gpx file required!

 

When I get a chance, I'll set up a new profile for benchmark hunting that uses PIDs, leaving the geocaching profile using names.

 

Patty